Since I have been doing this for over ten years, there is a lot of stuff in this folder. Much of it is unfinished, because generally speaking (as I mention in the altastic faq), my creative process goes like this:
- Have an idea for a page.
- Make a rudimentary plan and produce a working version using the knowledge I have at the time.
- Learn the very next day that there is a much better technology I could have used.
- Decide to redo the old page using said technology.
- Suddenly have an idea for a new page that wouldn't have been possible without the new technology.
- Work on the new page, putting the old page on hold for the moment.
- Forget entirely about the old page.
Once in a while, though, I go back through all the myriad folders within folders and see if I can find something to salvage.
The other day, I was writing a worksheet for one of my advanced students, attempting to explain how cryptic crossword clues work. Something must have sparked a connection in my brain, because I suddenly remembered that several years ago I had tried to create a crossword generator. It was a very simple affair - the user entered words and clues for them, and Javascript attempted to fit the words together in a crossword shape.
I thought this would be a good resource for teachers, and I was right, because before long I discovered that someone had already done it. That, plus the fact that I had a lot of other work to do, convinced me to drop the whole idea.
This was, by the way, before I was using any object-oriented code in my Javascript. If you examine the code (and I advise you to do so if you want a laugh) you'll see things like this:
function foo () {
window.bar = true;
}
window.words = new Array("apple", "banana", "mango");
window.clues = new Array("A fruit that in Japanese is a Beatle.",
"A yellow fruit.", "A very irie but messy fruit.");
Oh, be quiet. I was clearly aware that object-orientation would help things out, I just didn't know how to do it. So I made everything a property of the window object. It's technically object-oriented, if you just... oh, all right. I sucked. Let's move on.
Even though it's now ancient, I think it still has potential. I could severely trim down the code, maybe use AJAX to hand off some of the processing to PHP... so watch this space.
I do love discovering things like this, because there's often huge nostalgia value in them. The word list, for example, mainly contains words I thought Japanese junior high school kids would be able to understand. I kept needing to add more, though, which eventually led to me just pulling words off the top of my head while I coded. See if you can guess what show I was avidly watching at the time:
- colt
- dean
- samuel
- winchester
- yelloweyes
You can also tell how old it is from the fact I didn't call it the Crosswordinator. I'll be sure to rectify that if I do manage to create a working version....
Anyway, here it is. It opens in a new window because the size is not fixed, so it'll mess up the blog page layout. Enjoy! Hours of fun for the whole family!
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